It is usual in practice in the production of sausage products that the operation of filling a sausage to be formed or introducing the sausage meat is effected over a filling pipe into a packaging material that is closed at one end and has a tubular or bag-like configuration, generally formed of a flexible material. After the completion of the filling operation, a constricted plaited portion that is free from filling material is formed by means of two pairs of displacer shears. Two closures in the form of closure clips are then fitted onto that plaited portion, the closure clips closing the packaging material on both sides of the plaited portion. After that the plaited portion is severed. In order to further process the sausage produced in that way, that is to say, therefore to be able to smoke, dry, etc., the sausage product, a thread is supplied such that, when the clips are fitted to a sausage product, the thread is enclosed by the clips and is thus fixed to the sausage.
As already mentioned, many sausage products are then subjected to further processing, for example by smoking in a smoking chamber. For that purpose, the sausages are hung up separately on their threads on smoking bars, so that as far as possible, they do not touch each other. In practice in that respect, the smoking bars are fitted with sausages by hand.
In order to permit that to be done, for example, ring rounds or curved sausages are filled on a table with a horizontally extending table plate that directly adjoins the filling pipe of a sausage filling and clipping machine. Then the sausages, which are oriented in a horizontal plane, slide along an inclined downwardly extending ramp to a collecting location where manual loading of the stocks with sausages is effected.
DE 32 38 023 A1 (also published as U.S. Pat. No. 4,527,931) further discloses an apparatus in that there is provided a transport belt directly adjoining the discharge of the filling pipe of the sausage filling and clipping machine. The sausages that are removed from the filling pipe are conveyed by means of the transport belt in the form of a chain of sausages or combined together in paired relationship in a lying condition, that is to say in a horizontal orientation, to a transport screw. The transport screw in turn conveys the sausages to a magazine for smoking stocks on which the sausages are transferred to the individual smoking stocks.
The first-outlined system in the state of the art suffers from the disadvantage that the sausages slide along an inclined ramp, which involves the danger of damaging the packaging material of the sausages. In addition the sausages have to be gripped by hand and turned through 90° so that they can be pushed on to the smoking stocks, in a vertical orientation. That involves a considerable level of handling complication and expenditure.
In comparison, the last-discussed system in the state of the art is found to suffer from the disadvantage in that two conveyor apparatuses are arranged between the filling opening of the filling pipe and the smoking stock magazine, with the structure and mode of operation of the two conveyor apparatuses being quite different. Besides the structural complication and expenditure that this involves, a complicated control system is required in order to co-ordinate the filling operation and transporting the sausages away to the smoking stock magazine.